John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

Today I’ve started the first day at the NAB conference in Las Vegas. It’s a unique conference that showcases the best in broadcast media. There’s a lot of things that are of interest to healthcare. One of those things is the variety of displays that are being used to stream the various broadcast media. It’s not hard to see the hospital or home of the future that’s essentially one big electronic display of information.

With that as a backdrop, I was intrigued to read about this electronic tattoo that turns your skin into a screen:

It still has a ways to go before you’ll find it in a hospital or doctor’s office near you. However, it’s fascinating to see how we’re literally working on ways to have a display everywhere. In healthcare that’s really exciting. Plus, the tattoo includes a health sensor as well. Imagine if in a hospital or doctors visit you had one of these “tattoos” that was always showing your vital signs. Would be nice to have all of that information available. No doubt it would be streamed to your EHR or other data store in the cloud.

As this technology progresses it’s not hard to see that these tattoo displays could be a great way for your healthcare team to communicate messages to you. Add a few sensors and/or voice and you’ll be able to communicate back with them. Pretty powerful since some patients can’t lift a smart phone, but they might be able to lift their arm. Or if they can’t life their arm, they could have it left in a position where they could see it.

Getting the right health information communicated to the right people at the right time is going to be a major theme going forward in healthcare IT. We’re already working on it from a hundred different angles, but I think most of us can’t even imagine how much better this communication and data sharing will be over the next 5-10 years.